Happy Birthday Love

Happy 62nd.

Today marks the 11th birthday since your leaving this living plane.

Thank you for the love we shared and for your amazing spirit of life, both have given me courage to live, find joy in the present, peace in the past and even allow myself to experience love again.

As usual I love you and miss you everyday.

Thoughts on a Decade Passed…

May 24, 2002 ~ May 24, 2012

The months leading up to the 10 year mark have been more introspective than most giving thought to what the passing of a full decade means. In the final analysis what it truly means is that he’s been gone 10 years…120 months…520 weeks…3,652 days…87,658 hours…5,259,600 minutes…315,619,200 seconds…all spent putting one foot in front of the other and learning how to live outside the shadow of his being missing from my everyday life.  And, yet, he remains with me every single day…in the memories of the life we shared…in the faces of our children and grand...he is physically absent; still I am never without him in my heart. Where I once could not imagine a single second without him millions have passed and I still stand.

His life and the living of it has been the catalyst for not giving up my own. Even with a few missteps and backtracks along the way I am proud of having made a differently meaningful life from the unwelcome life cards that were dealt.  Along with my own headlong mulish stubbornness to survive, I have been both in need of and received a great deal of help along the way from my family and from a surprising, endearing network of online peers who have become friends. A lonely journey made bearable by sharing it with those who trod the same path…I am grateful for their company.

Recently I have left the safety net of that community to follow where the path of life now leads. (Though my wicked Scottish widow-friend has said more than once that there is no door marked Exit and that one is welcome home at any time.) After having shared my leaving with one of those peers I began to think of how it feels to step away from the little (or not so) cyber-haven that has been my online security blanket for the last 9 years cocooning me through many long dark nights of the soul. Though I knew I would eventually move out of that circle, I did not anticipate the slight in-breath of “Oh” and the tiny unease that struck me once the words were out. (Remember how it felt when the training wheels came off your bike? Scary and exciting at the same time) I had expected that I might have some parting words that have not come…just a fizzling out of my input predicated by too many things going on in my 3-D world.  Interesting.

In the end…it’s 10 years…monumental and nothing. It has put me in a funky place, but not a despairing one. I loathe still that I must live without him both loving him and missing him beyond description.  Joy and even love in the form of my dear and oh-so unexpected Handyman are welcomed with respect for when both seemed so far out of reach as to be impossible. 5 – 10 – mayhap 20 years from now, should I live so long, he will still be gone and I will still have walked forward every single one of them the memory of him still intact.

He left me better than he found me and I am blessed for having had him in my life.

March Right In....

"March bustles in on windy feet
And sweeps my doorstep and my street.
She washes and cleans with pounding rains,
Scrubbing the earth of winter stains.
She shakes the grime from carpet green
Till naught but fresh new blades are seen.
Then, house in order, all neat as a pin,
She ushers gentle springtime in."
-  Susan Reiner, Spring Cleaning 

Winter brings a sense of “coorie doon” (settling in or battening down)…a time to rest the spirit from the bustle of the dying year. For we who are widowed it seems also a time learn to find our way within the sadness that dwells deep in our bones…to work through the sorrow that keeps us wrapped within the hollow of our hearts.

Spring, or the hope of it, awakens the anticipation of something tantalizingly unseen just around the next corner. We have survived the bones of winter and watch for that first greening that welcomes life back into both the land and into our souls.

There is a burst to Spring…the seemingly all at once bloom to things that says “here I come”. It stirs the blood and tingles the brain with anticipation. It is a time also of confusion….winter…spring…no winter…no spring…the back and forth of light and dark, cold and the promise of the warmth to come.

We widowed folk also are a lot like that. Having come to terms with what we’ve lost, we fight to find what we can gain. New life comes hard. There is a certain comfort to the sorrow we cocoon ourselves within. But, just as the caterpillar metamorphoses from its womb of silk as the butterfly, so must we also free ourselves from the web of death back into the sunlight of living.

As Spring grows green and retirement approaches reality, I feel the stirring of that urge that to run I seem to have inherited from my dad…a growing need to move, move, move. (could be it’s a Spring Equinox thing…but, it’s there nonetheless.)

New vistas await and I am restless for the adventure to begin.

80 days and counting…..

"God Bless the Child"

But more importantly...

Bless the parent of the strong willed child…for he shall have no peace.

Double that to 2 toddlers barely a year apart and he shall also get no rest.

Pray not for patience…for in doing so one receives challenge to build that patience.

Ask the universe instead for mental quickness to outwit the little beggars…

…and 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

The rowdy, rambunctious tag team of Thing 1 and Thing 2, currently in residence at now quite aptly named Casa de Chaos, spend the abundance of their day in one state of agitation or another; singly and in tandem. (They even wake up agitated)  Beleaguered dad struggles to maintain composure and not give in to the urge to grab the duct tape, box them up and ship them COD to Abu Dabi. (He is a good young man who stepped up and in to accept the responsibility and consequences of, as he puts it, “being young and stooopid.”)

Much of the drama is the simple, normal, undaunted, lazer bean focus toddler quest for freedom.  Add the chaotic and, until now, unstable prior living arrangements and you have the recipe for atomic level explosion.  (Duck and cover.) One hopes the new living arrangement enables all to come to feel  a sense of haven here…a sense of…home.

During the rare and all too fleeting moments of abundant joy in life a toddler has, it is a pleasure to see the world through their eager, inexperienced eyes. There is nothing in the world like a child’s unvarnished curiosity about EVERYTHING. That is until the reality of life smacks them like a brick bursting the bubble and respite is sought in the small corner of peace in our bedroom cum sitting room…though the door to said room must now be locked due to a lack of understanding boundaries on the part of 2 year old Thing 1. (He’ll learn.)

Having taken them in rather than see them parceled out and singly passed around from one reluctant relative or another, we volunteered for this gig. And, while I am not sorry we have done so…I do find my tired self questioning my sanity in thinking that us old farts have the stamina to go the distance.

This was not part of the original design in the 2 year plan toward giving up the stay-put life in favor of that of the gypsy. It is, howsumever, that which we have voluntarily immersed ourselves during the transition between working and not.

Still….there is that moment when one opens the front door after a long day at the office  and those wee wicked monsters, with joy radiating from their grubby little faces, squeal in unabashed delight….”Nanaaaaaaaa!!!”  Wrapped in their small, but dirty, embrace it is all somehow worth the chaos that reigns within these four walls.

Their zest for life is boundless.

But…one is still grateful for a locked door.

And, 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

In the meantime....Eva Cassidy sings "God Bless the Child"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8E2gNf7QDE&feature=fvwrel